Lady Merton, Colonist Part 11

"Settlers, in their first year," said Anderson, smiling, as he waved back again.

But, to Elizabeth, it seemed a parable of the new Canada.

An hour later, amid a lightening of the clouds over the West, that spread a watery gold over the prairie, Anderson sprang to his feet.

"The Rockies!"

And there, a hundred miles away, peering over the edge of the land, ran from north to south a vast chain of snow peaks, and Elizabeth saw at last that even the prairies have an end.

The car was shunted at Calgary, in order that its occupants might enjoy a peaceful night. When she found herself alone in her tiny room, Elizabeth stood for a while before her reflection in the gla.s.s. Her eyes were frowning and distressed; her cheeks glowed. Arthur Delaine, her old friend, had bade her a cold good night, and she knew well enough that--from him--she deserved it. "Yet I gave him the whole morning," she pleaded with herself. "I did my best. But oh, why, why did I ever let him come!"

And even in the comparative quiet of the car at rest, she could not sleep; so quickened were all her pulses, and so vivid the memories of the day.

CHAPTER VI

Arthur Delaine was strolling and smoking on the broad wooden balcony, which in the rear of the hotel at Banff overlooks a wide scene of alp and water. The splendid Bow River comes swirling past the hotel, on its rush from the high mountains to the plains of Saskatchewan. Craggy mountains drop almost to the river's edge on one side; on the other, pine woods mask the railway and the hills; while in the distance s.h.i.+ne the snow-peaks of the Rockies. It is the gateway of the mountains, fair and widely s.p.a.ced, as becomes their dignity.

Delaine, however, was not observing the scenery. He was entirely absorbed by reflection on his own affairs. The party had now been stationary for three or four days at Banff, enjoying the comforts of hotel life. The travelling companion on whom Delaine had not calculated in joining Lady Merton and her brother--Mr. George Anderson--had taken his leave, temporarily, at Calgary. In thirty-six hours, however, he had reappeared. It seemed that the construction work in which he was engaged in the C---- valley did not urgently require his presence; that his position towards the railway, with which he was about to sever his official connection, was one of great freedom and influence, owing, no doubt, to the services he had been able to render it the year before. He was, in fact, master of his time, and meant to spend it apparently in making Lady Merton's tour agreeable.

For himself, Delaine could only feel that the advent of this stranger had spoilt the whole situation. It seemed now as though Elizabeth and her brother could not get on without him. As he leant over the railing of the balcony, Delaine could see far below, in the wood, the flutter of a white dress. It belonged to Lady Merton, and the man beside her was George Anderson. He had been arranging their walks and expeditions for the last four days, and was now about to accompany the English travellers on a special journey with a special engine through the Kicking Horse Pa.s.s and back, a pleasure suggested by the kindness of the railway authorities.

It was true that he had at one time been actively engaged on the important engineering work now in progress in the pa.s.s; and Lady Merton could not, therefore, have found a better showman. But why any showman at all? What did she know about this man who had sprung so rapidly into intimacy with herself and her brother? Yet Delaine could not honestly accuse him of presuming on a chance acquaintance, since it was not to be denied that it was Philip Gaddesden himself, who had taken an invalid's capricious liking to the tall, fair-haired fellow, and had urgently requested--almost forced him to come back to them.

Delaine was not a little bruised in spirit, and beginning to be angry.

During the solitary day he had been alone with them Elizabeth had been kindness and complaisance itself. But instead of that closer acquaintance, that opportunity for a gradual and delightful courts.h.i.+p on which he had reckoned, when the restraint of watching eyes and neighbourly tongues should be removed, he was conscious that he had never been so remote from her during the preceding winter at home, as he was now that he had journeyed six thousand miles simply and solely on the chance of proposing to her. He could not understand how anything so disastrous, and apparently so final, could have happened to him in one short week! Lady Merton--he saw quite plainly--did not mean him to propose to her, if she could possibly avoid it. She kept Philip with her, and gave no opportunities. And always, as before, she was possessed and bewitched by Canada! Moreover, the Chief Justice and the French Canadian, Mariette, had turned up at the hotel two days before, on their way to Vancouver. Elizabeth had been sitting, figuratively, at the feet of both of them ever since; and both had accepted an invitation to join in the Kicking Horse party, and were delaying their journey West accordingly.

Instead of solitude, therefore, Delaine was aware of a most troublesome amount of society. Aware also, deep down, that some test he resented but could not escape had been applied to him on this journey, by fortune--and Elizabeth!--and that he was not standing it well. And the worst of it was that as his discouragement in the matter of Lady Merton increased, so also did his distaste for this raw, new country, without a.s.sociations, without art, without antiquities, in which he should never, never have chosen to spend one of his summers of this short life, but for the charms of Elizabeth! And the more boredom he was conscious of, the less congenial and sympathetic, naturally, did he become as a companion for Lady Merton. Of this he was dismally aware. Well! he hoped, bitterly, that she knew what she was about, and could take care of herself. This man she had made friends with was good-looking and, by his record, possessed ability. He had fairly gentlemanly manners, also; though, in Delaine's opinion, he was too self-confident on his own account, and too boastful on Canada's, But he was a man of humble origin, son of a farmer who seemed, by the way, to be dead; and grandson, so Delaine had heard him say, through his mother, of one of the Selkirk settlers of 1812--no doubt of some Scotch gillie or shepherd. Such a person, in England, would have no claim whatever to the intimate society of Elizabeth Merton. Yet here she was alone, really without protection--for what use was this young, scatter-brained brother?--herself only twenty-seven, and so charming? so much prettier than she had ever seemed to be at home. It was a dangerous situation--a situation to which she ought not to have been exposed. Delaine had always believed her sensitive and fastidious; and in his belief all women should be sensitive and fastidious, especially as to who are, and who are not, their social equals. But it was clear he had not quite understood her. And this man whom they had picked up was undoubtedly handsome, strong and masterful, of the kind that the natural woman admires. But then he--Delaine--had never thought of Elizabeth Merton as the natural woman. There lay the disappointment.

What was his own course to be? He believed himself defeated, but to show any angry consciousness of it would be to make life very uncomfortable in future, seeing that he and the Gaddesdens were inevitably neighbours and old friends. After all, he had not committed himself beyond repair. Why not resume the friendly relation which had meant so much to him before other ideas had entered in? Ah! it was no longer easy. The distress of which he was conscious had some deep roots.

He must marry--the estate demanded it. But his temperament was invincibly cautious; his mind moved slowly. How was he to begin upon any fresh quest? His quiet pursuit of Elizabeth had come about naturally and by degrees. Propinquity had done it. And now that his hopes were dashed, he could not imagine how he was to find any other chance; for, as a rule, he was timid and hesitating with women. As he hung, in his depression, over the river, this man of forty envisaged--suddenly and not so far away--old age and loneliness. A keen and peevish resentment took possession of him.

Lady Merton and Anderson began to ascend a long flight of steps leading from the garden path below to the balcony where Delaine stood. Elizabeth waved to him with smiles, and he must perforce watch her as she mounted side by side with the fair-haired Canadian.

"Oh! such delightful plans!" she said, as she sank out of breath into a seat. "We have ordered the engine for two o'clock. Please observe, Mr.

Arthur. Never again in this mortal life shall I be able to 'order' an engine for two o'clock!--and one of these C.P.R. engines, too, great splendid fellows! We go down the pa.s.s, and take tea at Field; and come up the pa.s.s again this evening, to dine and sleep at Laggan. As we descend, the engine goes in front to hold us back; and when we ascend, it goes behind to push us up; and I understand that the hill is even steeper"--she bent forward, laughing, to Delaine, appealing to their common North Country recollections--"than the Shap incline!"

"Too steep, I gather," said Delaine, "to be altogether safe." His tone was sharp. He stood with his back to the view, looking from Elizabeth to her companion.

Anderson turned.

"As we manage it, it is perfectly safe! But it costs us too much to make it safe. That's the reason for the new bit of line."

Elizabeth turned away uncomfortably, conscious again, as she had often been before, of the jarring between the two men.

At two o'clock the car and the engine were ready, and Yerkes received them at the station beaming with smiles. According to him, the privilege allowed them was all his doing, and he was exceedingly jealous of any claim of Anderson's in the matter.

"You come to _me_, my lady, if you want anything. Last year I ran a Russian princess through--official. 'You take care of the Grand d.u.c.h.ess, Yerkes,' they says to me at Montreal; for they know there isn't anybody on the line they can trust with a lady as they can me. Of course, I couldn't help her faintin' at the high bridges, going up Rogers Pa.s.s; that wasn't none of my fault!"

"Faint--at bridges!" said Elizabeth with scorn. "I never heard of anybody doing such a thing, Yerkes."

"Ah! you wait till you see 'em, my lady," said Yerkes, grinning.

The day was radiant, and even Philip, as they started from Banff station, was in a Canadian mood. So far he had been quite cheerful and good-tempered, though not, to Elizabeth's anxious eye, much more robust yet than when they had left England. He smoked far too much, and Elizabeth wished devoutly that Yerkes would not supply him so liberally with whisky and champagne. But Philip was not easily controlled. The very decided fancy, however, which he had lately taken for George Anderson had enabled Elizabeth, in one or two instances, to manage him more effectively. The night they arrived at Calgary, the lad had had a wild desire to go off on a moonlight drive across the prairies to a ranch worked by an old Cambridge friend of his. The night was cold, and he was evidently tired by the long journey from Winnipeg. Elizabeth was in despair, but could not move him at all. Then Anderson had intervened; had found somehow and somewhere a trapper just in from the mountains with a wonderful "catch" of fox and marten; and in the amus.e.m.e.nt of turning over a bundle of magnificent furs, and of buying something straight from the hunter for his mother, the youth had forgotten his waywardness. Behind his back, Elizabeth had warmly thanked her lieutenant.

"He only wanted a little distraction," Anderson had said, with a shy smile, as though he both liked and disliked her thanks. And then, impulsively, she had told him a good deal about Philip and his illness, and their mother, and the old house in c.u.mberland. She, of all persons, to be so communicative about the family affairs to a stranger! Was it that two days in a private car in Canada went as far as a month's acquaintance elsewhere?

Another pa.s.senger had been introduced to Lady Merton by Anderson, an hour before the departure of the car, and had made such a pleasant impression on her that he also had been asked to join the party, and had very gladly consented. This was the American, Mr. Val Morton, now the official receiver, so Elizabeth understood, of a great railway system in the middle west of the United States. The railway had been handed over to him in a bankrupt condition. His energy and probity were engaged in pulling it through. More connections between it and the Albertan railways were required; and he was in Canada looking round and negotiating. He was already known to the Chief Justice and Mariette, and Elizabeth fell quickly in love with his white hair, his black eyes, his rapier-like slenderness and keenness, and that pleasant mingling in him--so common in the men of his race--of the dry shrewdness of the financier with a kind of headlong courtesy to women.

On sped the car through the gate of the Rockies. The mountains grew deeper, the snows deeper against the blue, the air more dazzling, the forests closer, breathing balm into the suns.h.i.+ne.

Suddenly the car slackened and stopped. No sign of a station. Only a rustic archway, on which was written "The Great Divide," and beneath the archway two small brooklets issuing, one flowing to the right, the other to the left.

They all left the car and stood round the tiny streams. They were on the watershed. The water in the one streamlet flowed to the Atlantic, that in its fellow to the Pacific.

Eternal parable of small beginnings and vast fates! But in this setting of untrodden mountains, and beside this railway which now for a few short years had been running its parlour and dining cars, its telegraphs and electric lights and hotels, a winding thread of life and civilisation, through the lonely and savage splendours of snow-peak and rock, transforming day by day the destinies of Canada--the parable became a truth, proved upon the pulses of men.

The party sat down on the gra.s.s beside the bright, rippling water, and Yerkes brought them coffee. While they were taking it, the two engine-drivers descended from the cab of the engine and began to gather a few flowers and twigs from spring bushes that grew near. They put them together and offered them to Lady Merton. She, going to speak to them, found that they were English and North Country.

"Philip!--Mr. Arthur!--they come from our side of Carlisle!"

Philip looked up with a careless nod and smile. Delaine rose and went to join her. A lively conversation sprang up between her and the two men.

They were, it seemed, a stalwart pair of friends, kinsmen indeed, who generally worked together, and were now entrusted with some of the most important work on the most difficult sections of the line. But they were not going to spend all their days on the line--not they! Like everybody in the West, they had their eyes on the land. Upon a particular district of it, moreover, in Northern Alberta, not yet surveyed or settled. But they were watching it, and as soon as the "steel gang" of a projected railway came within measurable distance they meant to claim their sections and work their land together.

When the conversation came to an end and Elizabeth, who with her companions had been strolling along the line a little in front of the train, turned back towards her party, Delaine looked down upon her, at once anxious to strike the right note, and moodily despondent of doing it.

"Evidently, two very good fellows!" he said in his rich, ponderous voice. "You gave them a great pleasure by going to talk to them."

"I?" cried Elizabeth. "They are a perfect pair of gentlemen!--and it is very kind of them to drive us!"

Delaine laughed uneasily.

"The gradations here are bewildering--or rather the absence of gradations."

"One gets down to the real thing," said Elizabeth, rather hotly.

Delaine laughed again, with a touch of bitterness.

"The real thing? What kind of reality? There are all sorts."

Elizabeth was suddenly conscious of a soreness in his tone. She tried to walk warily.

"I was only thinking," she protested, "of the chances a man gets in this country of showing what is in him."

"Remember, too," said Delaine, with spirit, "the chances that he misses!"

"The chances that belong only to the old countries? I am rather bored with them!" said Elizabeth flippantly.